


The Weight of Us

by simplyprologue



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:29:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura Roslin endured New Caprica, and Detention, and torture. Because she was Laura Roslin--that was what she did. She endured. And now this... was the after. With Bill. Companion fic to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/733513">For the Weary</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Weight of Us

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I understand that this is extremely sensitive material, and if you think that I used torture in a way that feels exploitative or problematic, please _do not hesitate_ to let me know, either in the comments on my tumblr, or what have you. But that being said... this fic really made me grow as a writer, and was a hell of a thing to write, so I hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> Thanks to [Emily](http://headtrip-honey.tumblr.com) and [Rachel](http://constantly-talking.tumblr.com) for helping me and and encouraging me. Especially Emily, for being my sounding board.

Laura Roslin being held in Detention was no longer a cause for the residents of New Caprica to riot. In comparison to her first stay, in the first forty-eight hours of unconditional surrender, the people were now meek and quiet, their noises of rebellion replaced by whispers of disquiet. It is not worth it, a notion with which Laura concurred, now that they knew just how easily the cylons would spray a crowd with gunfire.

Water from the leaking pipe dripped onto the floor a few feet from her head; she flinched, occasionally, at the noise.

They took her clothes this time, again, but did not replace them with the usual lice-infested jumpsuit.

Laura shivered on the damp concrete, arms crossed over her body, fingers digging into her weary bones, the thin fabric of her underwear. The cylons knew she was not yet broken. When they beat her. When they experimented on her with drugs. Nor when they threatened to blow up the school. She still remembered Saul Tigh’s screams from the other cell. She did not break then, either. She wondered what now, now that they could get away with more and more and the people would give them nothing back. She wondered how much longer she would be of value to them, alive. Bill was four months gone. She could give them no information on his whereabouts. And with her dead, the Resistance would be that much weaker, morale that much weaker.

If she was them she’d kill her too, before the new government got too settled, and she too much a part of the new fabric of society.

She should have stolen the frakking election.

The steady report of water droplets onto the concrete made her want to scream. Laura Roslin traced her fingers over the peeling paint on the floor, picking half-heartedly at the large grey flakes with her ragged fingernails, flinching, trying to will herself to stop hearing the noise. She wanted to crawl out of her skin, leave her body on the floor.

Four months.

How pale would she look in the fluorescent light? In contrast to the bruises marking her back, her ribs? Lying there, on the floor, in a ball. They did not bind her hands and feet this time. She wondered what for.

Rain beat against the barred window. It was so cold, out there and in her cell. The lights flickered and the building trembled in the aftermath of a particularly loud thunderclap. Laura wondered if the gods could reach them here, hidden in this forsaken nebula. Or if they just laughed at the sorry remnants of humanity. The gods had little mercy for them, it seemed. Why would they?

They were gods.

The door to her cell swung open, and Laura Roslin lifted her head.

She was right.

There were no questions.

Cavil said something, but his words blurred by the swift kick delivered to her abdomen. Suddenly, her cell was very, very crowded. Her vision skewed, stomach clenching down around nothing, and voices rose in argument.

Curling into a ball, she heard one of the Fours say that her lips were blue.

The Cavil model pressed the sole of his muddied boot to her belly, forcing her onto her back; her head hit the concrete with enough force to cloud her vision with purple spots, a dull, ringing pain echoing up the back of her skull to the backs of her eyes.

“Leave her face,” he said, now only a silhouette fading out against the open door. “She needs to be easily recognized.”

The first blow was not a surprise, but not one she could brace for, nevertheless—cold and tired and aching as she was. Where would they leave her body, she wondered. Would they dump her somewhere obscure, with someone in mind to stumble upon her beaten corpse? Or would it be a more generic message to the populace? Would she be strung up for all to see as they went about their morning routines? A sad spectacle for them to avert their eyes from while they tried to start the day?

Or would they leave her at Baltar’s feet, a mark of his culpability? Or perhaps they’d drag her to Saul’s tent, and put her in his bed. Or dump her, skin blue and purple and grey and barely breathing, at Cottle’s tent—a patient he could not save.

What did they want her death to mean?

 _What would it mean to Bill?_ an insidious little voice whispered in the back of her mind, yelling down the pounding in her skull.

"No,” she whimpered, pain blossoming like fire up her back.

She had not thought of the two of them. Instead, she had packed their months together away, tucked it deep inside herself where she could not reach them. Laura had forced herself to forget his warm arms, the summer air on their naked skin. His voice in her ear as he read to her by candlelight, the night yellow and damp with humid heat and the smell of sex.

She had assured the others he would come back for them. But would he be coming back for her?

What _would_ her death mean to him?

“Don’t.” _Don’t feel. Don’t start. It’ll only make it worse._

Make what worse? They were going to kill her.

She was so cold, and the dripping sounded so far away now. She thought they were hitting her with something, not just their steel-toed boots and closed fists. She felt the skin of her back tear open. Cold. She was cold, skin wet with sweat and blood. She hurt, but she did not cry out.

She had not allowed herself to think outside these past four months, could not take the weight of them on her conscience, not after the first questioning. They knew. Somehow, they knew. Baltar, probably. She and Bill had never bothered to be particularly discrete; Cavil had known he had found a weakness in her, and so stuck his hands to her insides and twisted until she packed Bill away entirely and stared back at Cavil with only trained disinterest in her eyes.

(She did not break, and William Adama was the last thing left in this universe who tempted her to do so. So she shut him away. _The weight of us_ , she thought. It was too much to bear.)

She was so cold, her slight frame wracked with shivers of pain, face pressed into the floor.

She had always been so warm with him; warm, dry, safe. _Loved_ , a small voice provided that even now she could not help but tamp down on. After all, she wanted to comfort herself with his memory, not overwhelm herself with it.

She hoped he was alive, did not want to think about what his death would mean to her. Not just... what it would mean for the people.

The room began to close in on her skin, the pain so close to her surface, pressing down until it stole her breath... and she let herself think about it. He entered her thoughts, and filled her with warmth. It felt good.

The first time she died, he held her hand.

Would she wake up on the Shore to find him waiting for her, or would he return to New Caprica weeks, months, _years_ from now to visit her grave? Would he read books to where she rested in the loamy soil? Place the flowers from up by their lake atop of her? How would he grieve her? She didn’t want him to grieve her, no, she didn’t want to die at all. She wanted summer and his arms around her. She wanted how Bill Adama’s eyes rested on her face when he thought she was sleeping, how he’d trail the backs of his fingers up and down the curve of her waist while they spooned, the soft cotton of the worn out tee shirts that he slept in, the fleet standard grey of his sheets. To lay in his rack and talk to him while he showered before a shift in CIC.

There was so little that Laura Roslin wanted, really--just only all of him, and to be outside of this moment.

 _Soon_ , she comforted herself.

When she was young, when the colonies still stood, every summer her family would go to the beach. And some mornings, before her sisters awoke, she would walk out to the sand, sit at where the tide kissed the shore, and watch the boats coming in. Watch the lighthouse power down, light by light, until there was only one left, the brightest one, the one that had kept them all safe through the night. It had always seemed so sad to her, then, when she was twelve, thirteen, fourteen. When she was young, and thought she knew so much.

He would not be on her Shore. If nothing else, she believed that Bill was alive. And he would come back for them. She wondered what exactly was dying inside this cell, under Cavil’s orders. He could kill her, but her love (she did not hide the word, not this time) would live with Bill.

She had loved him. It was the last inch of herself that she had, here in this prison, and it should have frightened her but it didn’t. It seemed so strange that her life should end like this, when little more than a year and a half ago it was going to end with him holding her hand.

But for a year, she had allowed herself to break past the iron constructs of her bones and her skin, the ones she had made in the absence of her mother, her father and her sisters. She had allowed herself think outside what she had always thought herself capable of, outside of her grief and this genocide. For a year, she had him, and said her apologies to no one, least of all Cavil, or Baltar.

And for a year, they had had love.

And Cavil would kill her now. He would, she had no doubt, as darkness encroached in waves, her fingers limp against the floor. She could not breathe. Instead, she choked as dark blood came up from her belly, clogged her throat.

He would take every inch, but one. That inch would survive, like the last light left on as the dawn stretched over the horizon. Because Bill _had_ to be alive. To die without giving up, she had to believe that.

She left that last light to his eyes (blue, impossibly so; she may have fallen in love with them first, she thought) and fell out of consciousness.

* * *

In the end, it hadn’t mattered. She lived, and woke up in Cottle’s tent a few days later with a raging fever and an IV drip in her arm pumping her full of antibiotics. Two weeks later, they received the transmission that the Galactica was coming for them.

And here she was, now. Forty-eight hours out of New Caprica. She had spent the first fourteen organizing the refugees after being kicked off the Colonial One so it could be repaired. And after that Cottle had found her, stuck an IV back into her arm, and after the bag emptied, ushered her out of his sight to find a place to sleep, not so subtly hinting at _where_ that place should (or could) be.

She didn’t wake up the first time he came back to his quarters, but woke hours later wrapped in his arms, his nose pressed into the nape of her neck. Carefully, she had turned inside his embrace so he wasn’t pressed up against her back, hissing when he tightened his grip on her in response. Even more careful (of herself, and not to wake him), she reached up for the bottle of painkillers Cottle had pressed into her hands before kicking her out, shook out two, and swallowed them. She fell back asleep with her face buried in his shoulder.

When she woke up again he had gone back to CIC, and so Laura managed to get herself out of bed to shower--gingerly, refusing to turn her back to the spray--before calling Zarek.

_Three days._

Then slipped the tee shirt he slept in the night before over her head, and crawled back between his sheets.

The next time she woke, she found him sitting on his couch.

And here she was, back in his sheets, body still thrumming from climax. His fingers traced the jutted lines of her hipbones; she could basically _hear_ him worrying about her. Not that she could blame him. But he didn’t ask about her back, at least not directly. She was grateful for it, when she had started _crying_ during sex, of all things...

She was warm, safe, and dry, in his arms. It was what she wanted, wasn’t it?

In the quiet aftermath of their reunion, it was hitting her.

Tears prickled at her eyes again, but she willed them away. _I’m better. Now, with you. Here._ Well, she was, wasn’t she? And she couldn’t just shut herself off again, now that he wasn’t just some fantasy to give herself comfort as she thought she was about to die in a cylon cell. But she would have to; they had only three days.

She’d have to put him away again. Could she, though, this time? New Caprica had seemed interminable at the time as well, and she had broken. Could she starve herself of him? She would have to. And her bruises would fade and the stitches would be taken out, skin would gloss over into scars. All her marks, including the one he left above her collarbone, would disappear. Like they never happened, never mattered.

Did she want that?

 _No_ , a small, fragile voice said, in the back of her mind. If she had to live with only these three days, for however long, forever, maybe... she wanted him to know all of it. And he was bound to see, sooner or later, even if he wasn’t going to ask.

Should he stumble in on her with her shirt off in the head or should she... it would be for the best, just to...

Sitting up with a sudden burst of energy, she felt him startle beside her.

“Laura?”

She toyed with the hem of the shirt, desperately trying to keep her breathing even. Don’t cry. She needed to show him. She needed him to understand, for when... and even after. He needed to see, so he could understand what she needed to do, what they needed to do. Because she wanted to just lie there, with him, forever. She was in pain, she was bone-tired. It was so tempting just to call Zarek and frak the fleet and just stay _here_ , where she was warm, and safe, and loved.

“Laura, you don’t have to--”

She let out a shaky breath. “I want to.” The words came out of her mouth quickly, and shattered like glass. She took another breath. “It’s just... um... it’s a little...”

After she had gotten out of the shower, she had forced herself to look. Down on the planet, there had been no time. Even if there had been, there wasn’t even a mirror to use except the little compact that had once also held her face powder, before it had run out.

It was horrifying. She knew how it felt, of course. Knew that she couldn’t lift her left arm very high or twist a certain way, but looking at her mottled skin, the curved suture lines, the deep bone bruises... was a very different thing. And she knew he had felt them, to. Had deliberately not reacted, for her sake. And she was _thankful_ , she was, but she needed his reaction, now. She wanted him to... she wanted someone besides Cottle’s clinical hands touching them.

“I... I want to,” she said again, softly this time.

Neither of them said anything for several long moments that were filled only with the sounds of their breathing. Laura stared at her bare legs, willing back the tears at the edge of her vision. She laughed sadly, before finally pulling the shirt over her head with her good arm and awkwardly letting it slide down her left.

“Frak,” he muttered, voice angry and the word said in such a way that belied the fact that he did not mean to speak it aloud. But he did notice that he did. “I--sorry. Shit, Laura.”

“It’s okay.” She didn’t whisper, but her voice was quiet. “I mean,” she laughed, nearly giggling, “it’s not, but it has to be.”

“Can I...?” Fingertips resting lightly on the sides of her waist, he sat up behind her. She nodded, and shivered when he carefully gathered her hair in his hands and smoothed it over the shoulder he had already picked out as the uninjured one.

She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand when he traced up swollen flesh with tremendous care. When he placed a soft kiss at the end of the long, looping laceration curling up her left shoulder blade, she had to bite her lip to hold back the shudders that threatened to be unleashed at his touch.

“How did--”

He cut off the beginning of his question as soon as it left his lips, and Laura could almost feel his cautious gaze falling on the back of her head.

“It’s all right,” she sighed. “It’s you, Bill.”

Another soft kiss, thoughtful, almost, placed on the edge of where she knew the skin was angry and red. “I don’t want to push you, Laura. I don’t... want to upset you.”

She fought to keep her voice even. _Stupid man_ , she thought, half-angry and half-amused. “I already took the frakking shirt off.” She knew her voice sounded strained; she could hear the desperation in her voice. “I just...”

“Okay.” He skirted his palms up and down her sides, his calloused fingers rough and familiar. “I’m sorry.” Another kiss that lingered. “I know.”

They sat there, his hands mapping her deep, controlled breaths as they traveled up and down her ribcage, his lips resting against the bruise on her left shoulder. It was a deep purple, almost black, and hard to the touch, but tender still; she could only just feel the affectionate chain of kisses he trailed up to right below her ear.

Eventually, she tugged the shirt off her arm and let it fall to the floor, and he guided her with gentle hands to lay down onto her stomach.

“How...” he outlined the edge of a bruise, and Laura was reminded of how his fingers moved when he was working on his model; his hands soft, deliberate, and precise. “How long ago did...?”

“A few weeks. Two... two weeks ago. They knew we were moving the weapons cache. I think they wanted to know when and where.” She snorted softly, turning her face so that she could see him. “Not that they wound up asking any questions.”

“What do you mean?” Another kiss, pressed tenderly along the dip of her spine, his lips moving from protruding node to protruding node, stopping where the inflammation began. His voice was controlled.

“Cavil said, before...” She hesitated, but his hands did not; he encouraged her with gentle, sweeping strokes. “Before they... he said to leave my face. To make sure I was recognizable. And after... they left me, outside Colonial One.” She deadened her voice, so she would be able to continue. “I wasn’t breathing. If Saul hadn’t sent people to be waiting for them to release me...”

They had wanted Baltar, or one of his cronies, to find her body. Mud-soaked, in her underwear, and beaten to death.

She snorted again.

“It was supposed to be a message to Baltar, I guess.” Her mind was suddenly transported back to the moments before she blacked out, when she had been ready to die. “Instead I woke up two days later in Cottle’s tent, halfway septic and still concussed.” She gave a little laugh, focusing her eyes on the minutia cluttering his desk. “I didn’t even really remember what happened until a few days ago.”

“Probably for the best.” His voice was thick with emotion, and Laura tried not to smile. Instead, she buried her face into his pillow. It smelled like him; she had missed that too. Then his fingers were in her hair again, brushing it away from her neck and shoulders. When he next spoke, his voice was close to her ear and choked with ardor. “Please tell me they didn’t try to hurt you again.”

“No.” She hummed while he continually ran his fingers through her unruly hair. She wouldn’t tell him that the cylons had ordered her to be executed, the day he jumped back into orbit. She wouldn’t deny it if he asked, but she didn’t want to bring it up... not right now. “The next time they took me into detention it was on Baltar’s orders. I wasn’t... I wasn’t to be touched, then.” She laughed, dark and bitter. “He had the gall to tell me that no one had been tortured.”

He said nothing, but his breathing changed.

“No, I was... I was ready to die in that cell, Bill.”

“Laura,” he rasped. He sounded like he was about to cry; he probably was, Laura figured.

She opened and closed her mouth around a few aborted sentences, before reaching to take the hand of the arm he was propping himself up on. Looping in and out of the spaces between his knuckles with her fingertips, she occupied herself with the tactile before finally committing to what she wanted to say.

“They did mean for me to die, Bill. And I was... I was ready.” He dropped down onto his elbow, slung his other arm low over her hips, and pressed his face into the back of her neck. How could she tell him about how she had thought of him? Why she had sought out his rack, his quarters, his clothing? His touch, above all else?

“I thought of you, while they were... when I was in that cell, before I lost consciousness. I thought of you, and how I... feel, about you, and I was ready.” Her voice was raw, scraped hollow by the weight of them. _It’s too much to bear, alone._ “I shut myself off, for so long down there, after you jumped away. I thought that if I didn’t feel anything at all it would... I don’t know, make me a better leader. Make it hurt less. But after Cavil gave the order and I... it hurt so bad.” Tears threatened to overflow and she let them, wiping them away with a short giggle. “And I was so tired. And so cold. And I knew that... I was going to die and all I could think of was you.”

The lights hadn’t gone out. And she hadn’t died. And New Caprica was lightyears away, by this point. And for three more days, she would have this, and make her apologies to no one. Because Bill Adama was her inch, her last light in the lighthouse. And she was safe here, in his arms, in his bed, surrounded by his comforting bulk.

And then she would have to shut him away, like she did on New Caprica. But would she be able to, now?

Bill eased onto his side, leaving his palm to rest on the small of her back, using his free hand to wipe his eyes.

“When does Cottle have to take the stitches out?” he asked, forcing his tone to be mild. She could have loved him for it. Charting the curve of her cheekbone with his mouth, he kissed his way to her mouth, caressing her lips sweetly.

She sighed out of the kiss, and then watched him reach down for the tee shirt and gesture for her to sit up. “He said to come back tomorrow.” She thought for a moment, a wave of exhaustion washing over her with the realization. “Today. They were supposed to be taken out a few days ago.”

“I’ll come with you.” His eyes were so earnest. And so blue, she thought, even when they were red-rimmed.

She giggled, and he helped her pull the shirt back over her head. “You don’t have to hold my hand, Admiral.” Her voice was soft, and tired, but not brittle. Merely pliant, when he cupped her chin in his hand. “They’re just stitches.”

“Just,” he scoffed, but his voice was only playing at light-hearted. His face reminded her of his frantic words on his couch. He had worried about her. Just like how she had thought of him.

But for tonight, they had each other. And if nothing else, New Caprica had taught Laura Roslin that even the certain future was uncertain. But they had three days.

She hummed, and leaned in to kiss him again, softer still. “If you really want to,” she murmured, lips a breath away from his.

Three days.

And she would take every second of them that she could get.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
